No matter what you thought of him and I liked him, the obsessive media coverage of the death of Nelson Mandela is now boring me stiff.

It was the same with Princess Diana’s tragic death. We were on holiday at the time of the funeral in Northumberland and I deliberately chose to go and sit on the beach by myself on Holy Island, to get away from it all.

Death is a personal thing and we all have our own ways of coping with grief.

I just get on with life, as there is no other positive thing to do.

I shall go for a walk by the river, have some lunch and then bring my shopping home and watch the football all afternoon.

I dread to think what fuss, we’re going to see, when some of the great and good of this world die. They’ll all be out to outdo South Africa’s borefest for Mandela.

I was just listening to reports of the Oscar Pistorius case on the radio and was surprised to hear that there are no jury trials in South Africa. This explains, why much of the evidence against the athlete has been fully discussed in the media, as the case will be decided by a magistrate.

There’s more about juries in South Africa here. Juries were abolished in 1969, in the apartheid era.

Surely, the Penguin Beach must be one of the best wild animal displays in the United Kingdom. The heron in one picture is a wild cheeky visitor according to this article in the Mail.

Although, I’m generally against a lot of wild animal displays, this one is rather different, in that a good proportion of the penguins were actually bred in the Zoo.

I’ve actually seen penguins in the wild twice; in the Galapagos Islands and South Africa. It has always surprised me that so many people go to Cape Town on holiday and never check out the penguins, that live all over that coast.

Yorkshire Radio reporter, Jonathan Buchan calculated yesterday, that Britain’s largest county, Yorkshire would be eleventh in the Olympic medal table above Japan, South Africa and Australia. Since then the Brownlee brothers have won a gold and a bronze medal, so they must have moved up a bit.

If they get a couple more, they might just edge above Germany. They’re probably well above Prussia already!

In some ways it’s one of the best pieces of news for Africa in a long time, but the decision of the SKA organisation to site their new radio telescope in remote parts of Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, is to be welcomed. The details are here on the BBC’s web site.

Milton Nkosi from the BBC says this about the project.

This decision will help to change the perception that Africa is a dark continent full of death and destruction and where little scientific research is carried out.

The telescope will deliver thousands of jobs and will showcase South Africa’s rich history in astronomy.

The SKA will have 3,000 antennas across a vast semi-desert part of South Africa known as the Karoo. The site is already home to seven massive Gregorian dish antennas that form part of the Karoo Array Telescope, or Kat7.

The only thing history tells us about it, is that the project will get bigger. And it will be joined by other large instruments.

A large amount of the fish caught in the sea ends up as animal feed. The Sunday Times reports how in South Africa, a process has been developed to create chicken feed from maggots fed on blood from abattoirs. Sounds gruesome!

But if it means we take less fish from the sea to feed animals, it’s surely better.

The British tell Irish jokes, the Dutch tell some about Belgium and all the friends I’ve ever had from Zimbabwe have told jokes about stupid South Africans, usually of Boer ancestry.

Here‘s a true story about some South Africans who went to New Zealand for the rugby. Instead of booking a hotel in Eastbourne, a suburb of Wellington, they booked one in Eastbourne, by the sea in Sussex.

I suppose it could have been worse. There’s another Eastbourne in County Durham, wghich is even further away. They could have watched the athletics yesterday and the Great North Run today, though.

About This Blog

What this blog will eventually be about I do not know.

But it will be about how I’m coping with the loss of my wife and son to cancer in recent years and how I manage with being a coeliac and recovering from a stroke. It will be about travel, sport, engineering, food, art, computers, large projects and London, that are some of the passions that fill my life.

And hopefully, it will get rid of the lonely times, from which I still suffer.